The Workin' Man's Cookbook (ePub)

First of all, I am not a chef. I cook for pleasure, not profit. (Unless this book takes off, of course.) I learned to cook primarily from my mother. When I was a teenager I was always hungry. Mom was usually preparing dinner when I came home from school and I would sneak in and try to grab a meatball or sausage from the skillet when she wasn''t looking. She caught me a few times and said if I was gonna be in the kitchen, I might as well help her get supper ready. Hey, it got me out of doin'' the dishes.

When I went off to college, or I should say, when I went off to a town that had a college, I got a job in a restaurant as a dishwasher. Being the industrious young lad that I was, I soon worked my way up to busboy. One step higher up the food chain, no pun intended. The cool thing about being a busboy was that you got to pick through the leftovers before the dishwashers got to them.

I don''t know if you''re aware or not, but there are a lot of drunks working as cooks. Almost every night one of the cooks would be passed out on the kitchen floor. I got promoted to salad chef pretty quickly, not because I was sober, but because I was the last one standing. Eventually I defaulted my way up to fry cook. And finally, of course, I ended up preparing the surf and turf. God help you if you sent something back to the kitchen.

The rest I pretty much learned by hook or by crook. If I found a dish I liked in a restaurant, I would go home and try to figure out how they prepared it, what spices they used. Sometimes you just end up throwing things together in a pot because that''s all you''ve got.